Herbs & Spices

“Herb, you’re two days late, if I don’t see the money in my account before mediation today...”

“I know. I’m sorry, Gladys. You know I’m trying.” Herb Haroldson told his ex-wife.

“That’s your problem, Herb. You always try. Have the money in my account by 2pm today and…”

“Herb, I’m going to need you to redo the Henderson report, you’ll find the marked-up changes in red,” Gary Withers, Herb’s boss interrupted as he walked past his cubicle. “And no personal calls on company time. You know the rules.”

Herb was a middle-aged, out-of-shape, office-worker with sweaty armpits and his sleeves rolled up. He often fantasized about murdering his boss but like most things in life, he failed to follow through with it.

“I’m sorry, Gladys… gotta go.”

“Herb, don’t you hang up on…”

He hung up on her.

Before returning to the Henderson report, he logged in to his bank app and saw a balance of $42.37; nowhere near the child support amount he was required to pay Gladys this afternoon.

So, in a fit of desperation, he mustered the courage to ask Gary for a raise and an early payment of his salary.

Gary just laughed, “good one, Herb,” he said before returning to his work. “I was serious about the Henderson report, though. Your numbers didn’t add up, typos everywhere, incomplete sentences… we have a meeting with them first thing tomorrow so I’ll need it redone by at least 4pm today or it’s both our necks on the line. They’re literally our biggest client.”

“But Gary, I have mediation at two.”

Gary sighed. “Herb, you knew that report needed to be on my desk last week. You’ve been having a hard time with the divorce so I gave you a few more days. It’s nowhere near ready so you gotta help me out here. Please.”

Herb tried to speak but Gary interrupted him.

“Look Herb, you can finish the report and keep working here or go to mediation and… well, it’s up to you.”

Once again, like dozens of other times in his life, Herb faced two choices that seemed beyond unfair to him. Ultimately, he figured it would be easier to feign sickness and miss the divorce mediation than it would to be unemployed. So he turned off his phone and went back to work.

With all the stress and crippling personal issues, he managed to concentrate for only five minutes out of the five hours he spent updating the report. 4 p.m. came and went and just after the sky went black, Gary returned to Herb’s desk and asked if the report was finished.

Humiliated, Herb had to say it wasn’t, which further upset Gary who now had to wait for Herb’s updates and review the report later that night. Against his better judgment, he asked to have a look at the work Herb had done on the report since he started working on it earlier that day - almost nothing had changed.

Gary was furious. This wasn’t the first time Herb spent hours on a task without actually accomplishing anything. So, in a moment of haste, Gary fired him on the spot and left.

Herb was shattered. Not only did he bring a world of legal and financial pain upon himself by missing mediation today, he was now also out of the same job he tried to save.

This broke him and led him to the only option he had left - ridding the world of his failures which were inextricably linked to him.

**********

The city skyline felt oddly peaceful as Herb took it in one last time. He approached the ledge of the Manhattan skyscraper where he worked, ready to take the ultimate plunge. He imagined the thrill of the descent, the wind through his thinning hair, the speed, the ultimate exhilaration… However, just before he crossed the threshold between life and death, he spotted something in the corner of his eye and quickly spun around. He refocused his vision and saw a shadowy, humanoid creature with fiery glowing eyes that was slowly approaching him.

Frozen by fear, Herb just watched on as the creature minimized the gap between them. However, it didn't do anything. It just stood before him and, for a moment, they just stared at each other like they were equally curious about each other's existence.

In his bones, Herb just knew he couldn't outrun this thing so he tried to communicate with it.

“I'm Herb and I don't want any trouble, I was just about to leave. Please don't hurt me.”

That's what he intended to say but he just nervously strung those words together and vocalized a bunch of slurred nonsense.

The creature reached out its hand to touch him and he flinched; but to his surprise, the shadowy hand simply passed through him like smoke.

“Relax, Herb. I can't hurt you. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't.” The creature's voice was eerily similar to his own and not at all what he was expecting. Something that looked that scary should have had a deep, booming growl if the countless horror movies he watched were anything to go by.

“What are you?” Herb asked, sounding a little more coherent this time.

The creature sighed as it sat on the ledge, revealing its translucent body in front of the city lights.

“Where to begin? Maybe with the closest point of reference your kind has for mine. I can’t be in sunlight, cross anyone’s threshold without an invitation, have a reflection; I’m not particularly fond of garlic, and I feed on the life-force of humans. You guys have a name for that except we’re way more pathetic than you think. For instance, as you just discovered, we’re non-corporeal, which means I can’t lay a finger on you let alone drink your blood. But I can kind of kill you, it just takes a really long time. It started years ago and was literally about to reach its dramatic conclusion just now… that is, until you saw me, which I admit is kind of unprecedented.”

“You’re a vampire?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmmm…” Herb replied, slowly processing everything the creature had just said. “So how come you’re not…”

“Tangible? Ordinarily visible? Yeah, that’s just kind of how we are.”

Still confused, Herb again asked the creature what it was.

“Alright, I guess we have time for this,” it replied. “We’re basically manifestations of inexplicable human misery. When something earth-shatteringly bad happens in an instant, like when the judge banged the gavel that led to your court ordered child support; or, when it happens gradually, like all those years of unpaid overtime for your verbally abusive boss that ultimately led to your divorce, something inside you breaks. Or should I say breaks off, branches off… whatever. That something was me. When you were pushed to the limit, when you lost your will to live, that desire for life kind of split off and became… me. So in a way, I guess that makes me one of your kids that isn’t covered by the court ordered child support.” The creature finished its spiel with an unnerving chuckle.

“Wait, so that’s it?” Herb asked. “That’s not like a vampire at all. It’s more like a surgically removed parasitic twin.”

“Well, I mean parasitic does kind of fit here since we do feed off humans in a manner of speaking.”

“What? How?”

“Your despair. We’re a product of it, we hunger for it. It not only sustains us but it’s like an addiction. We can’t get enough of it.”

“That doesn’t sound monstrous at all!” Herb replied, more confidently this time. “So you're saying you consume people's feelings of misery and anguish. If that's true, and I've felt suicidal for years, why didn't you just feed on me? I would've gladly given away my pain.”

“That’s because you never wanted things to get better. You didn't think they could. That complete lack of hope made you bitter… literally, it made you too bitter for me to eat so I moved on.”

Herb sat next to the shadow creature. “Am I still bitter?” He asked. “Can you try eating my pain now? I feel a little better after talking to you.”

“I, I… that's your problem Herb. Everything's always about you. What's in it for me? Why would I help you when I have an entire world full of miserable humans to feed off of?”

Herb didn’t answer. This became one of the few instances in his life when he began to introspect.

“That’s good, you’re thinking for once. Certainly better than your signature M.O. of acting first and thinking never,” the creature observed.

“Thanks… thanks for that condescending observation; I haven’t had the luxury of time like you in case you haven’t noticed.” Herb shot back.

“Ooh, feisty,” the creature said. “If only you used that spine of yours years ago…”

Growing impatient, Herb countered, “alright, here’s a question for you - if you’ve got the whole world at your disposal, and can go anywhere, eat anything, why do you need me? Are you just here to get your rocks off watching me fail? I can’t even tell if you’re real or just a product of my mind finally breaking.”

“Oh, I’m real but let me answer your question like this - when we separated, we both took important pieces of the overall whole. I got your grit, your nerve, your assertiveness, your sense of adventure; you lost all that and were left with nothing but the loser syndrome. This is why you let people walk all over you. You hate the way Gary treats you, you fantasize about killing him but you’re too much of a coward to do anything about it.”

“That’s lovely, but it doesn’t answer my…”

“Don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry,” Herb instinctively replied.

“See - that, right there. You apologize without thinking. Herb, I can’t hurt you, I’m not above you in any way and still you let me take control of the conversation. That’s your problem and this… this is where I think we can help each other.

I don’t have a physical body which really limits what I can do. As you can appreciate, the prospect of drifting through the universe for all eternity becomes a bit of an existential crisis after a while and the lifestyle becomes kind of stale. If I had a body, however, there’s a lot more I could do in terms of interacting with the world. And don’t get me wrong, you’d get the better end of that deal, with my moxie, the world’s our oyster if we could somehow… re-attach ourselves.”

“How do we do that?” Herb asked, completely sold on the creature’s proposition without giving it a second thought.

“I don’t know, maybe if I walk ‘into you’ and we both think about merging, it’ll happen?”

“Worth a shot,” Herb, who had nothing to lose, replied.

And just like that, the two were recombined.

**********

The next day, Herb quit his job, sold everything he owned and used it to pay off his debts, agreed to all the terms put forward by his ex-wife’s lawyer, and embarked on a new life with the shadowy creature’s voice in his head guiding his decisions, ready to start eating other people’s misery… for a price.

“By the way, do you have a name?” Herb asked the creature.

“Never needed one… but I just introduced a whole lotta variety into this thing you call a life and since variety is the spice of life, you might as well call me ‘Spices’.”

“Herb & Spices,” Herb laughed. “Extremely corny, on the nose, and cliché… but who cares. No one will ever find out.”

“Yep, it’ll be all you. Think of the possibilities, unlicensed grief relief therapist today, cult leader with millions of followers to do your bidding tomorrow.”

“What’s that now?” Herb asked.